Sporadic Entertainment

Since March 2005 or so, master games designer Will Wright was hidden in his neon-lit cave, hacking along his masterpiece, Spore. With its launch delayed several times — and an unexpected announcement by Steve Jobs that Will had been having fun doing a port of Spore to the iPhone for several months — the expectations were not huge. They were of galactic proportions. This would basically be the game that would conquer the whole gaming world and leave everybody else sucking their thumbs and crying “why didn’t I think of this before?”

As most of you know, I’m not a gamer — but I have to admit my partiality to both Will Wright’s and Sid Meier‘s games — strategy games, specially those where there is some user-generated content, are something I used to enjoy, in my old days when I still had some time to play them 🙂

Like millions (billions?) of others, I was expecting Will Wright’s next ultra-mega-success, even fully knowing that SimCity‘ssuccess was due to its extraordinary marketing (and we all know whom to “blame” for that, don’t we? 🙂 ) and not necessarily only because of the technology behind it. Still, its undeniable that SimCity was a landmark in gaming; and The Sims was the most successful game ever designed, in terms of sales.